Word: khrushchevism
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When the Soviet ship Baltika throbbed into New York harbor one morning in September 1960, demonstrators on a chartered sightseeing boat waved placards: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE; STALIN DROPPED DEAD. HOW ABOUT YOU? Nikita Khrushchev laughed and pointed. A few weeks later at the United Nations, a Philippine delegate gave a speech complaining about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev astonished the General Assembly by taking off his brown loafer and banging it on the table as if it were a spoon on an infant's high chair, except that in this case the banging...
That is the iconic memory of Khrushchev--squat, pinkish, piggy, with glittering eyes, a survivor's cunning and an impishly brutal sense of theater. At the Vienna summit, he gave John Kennedy a famous mugging. J.F.K. came away muttering, "I never met a man like this. [I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill 70 million people in 10 minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say 'So what...
What did Kennedy expect? Khrushchev understood that style of statecraft. He had learned from the monster himself, sitting at Joseph Stalin's right hand--or in his savage vicinity--for decades as cheerleader, yes-man and ideological dogsbody: a "nice guy," as his Kremlin cronies called him, who cheerfully survived Stalin's almost recreational paranoia even when so many of the evil crew (including Yezhov and Beria) were led offstage and shot...
...strike would be 1,080 sorties. This would be followed by an invasion; we had 180,000 troops mobilized in southeastern U.S. ports. We didn't learn until 30 years later that the Soviets already had 162 warheads in Cuba, and Fidel Castro had already recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that nuclear weapons be used if the U.S. invaded. That's how close we came. Events were slipping out of control...
Even so, by Oct. 27 Khrushchev was not giving any sign of backing down. We met all day with the President, split between those who believed we should attack and those who thought we should negotiate. The Joint Chiefs pushed for an invasion. Khrushchev had sent a hard-line offer that morning. But Kennedy decided simply to take the Soviet leader up on his offer of the previous night, proposing to withdraw the missiles if the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev accepted on Sunday. He was so worried that war would break out in the six hours...